She shook her head.
“Then I have to administer the dose.”
I rolled up her sleeve. She grabbed my arm. “Wait,” she said. “Just . . . one more minute. Please. I’d like one more minute.”
I sat back. I looked over to Solara, her eyes never leaving Olivia. The woman looked skyward, through the canopy of harsh, wet branches. Leaves glossy like wrapping paper. The sky gray and flat, as if it had been born that way. Her eyes scanned left to right. Her face was madly perspiring from a broken fever. Big fat raindrops rolled off the leaves above and rinsed the beaded sweat away. She appeared comfortable, if only for a moment. Her irises contracted, as if she’d just been exposed to a flashbulb. Her pupils tightened to snake eyes on a pair of dice. She turned back to me. “This isn’t how I planned on it all turning out. I wanted more than this.”
“I’m sorry, Olivia.”
“It’s okay.”
She gave me the nod. I turned off the recording and stuck her with the squeeze syringe. Her body quickly deflated, nesting within the compressed underbrush. I went around and finished the sweep. Most of the victims were unable to speak. As I finished, I could feel the ghosts pressing against me. I looked up and envisioned myself at the bottom of a vast ocean floor, white phantasms densely packed above and around me, like swarms of giant jellyfish. I imagined them multiplying by the second, an army of the dead ever growing and compacting in the emptiness. Frenzied. Screaming. Moshing. Coiling around my body and constricting it. Slipping into my mouth with every breath. They were screaming silently at me, as if I were staring at them from a soundproof room. They crammed in tighter and tighter. I held my breath. Solara came up and tapped my shoulder, her red hair matted down by the falling rain.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“I’m okay,” I said. “You?”
“Not at all.”
“Come on. There’s beer in the backseat.”
I unloaded bags of quicklime onto the victims and drew a red circle around them, then nailed the warning sign down into the ground, and that was that. I hurried Solara back to Little Bertha. She got in the passenger seat, and I threw my key fob on the driver’s seat and closed the door to walk around. I went to open my door and it was locked. I looked through the window at Solara, who had her right hand on the lock and her left hand on the fob. She looked at me, scouring my face for signs of rage, but I wasn’t mad. If I were her, I’d have considered it too. She relented and unlocked the door.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s not a problem. I get it.” I felt an uncommon comfort in her presence.
“You do those sweeps a lot?”
“Not as often as I used to. They tend to let the outbreaks go unless they come near the DC area. Has PR value—proactive, merciful, whatever.”
“It’s creepy to be in the center of it. To see it all laid out like that.”
I grabbed two beers from the backseat and opened them. I offered one to her. She rebuffed me at first, then thought better of it and grabbed the can.
“My sister died this way,” I said. “A call came in one night from her. I got bad vibes from it. Ever have that feeling, where you feel compelled not to answer the call, as if you already know something horrible awaits you on the other end?”
“Of course.”
“I’m the sort of person who always has to answer the phone. I’ve tried screening calls before, and I never make it past the third ring.”
“I have that problem.”
“So I opened the WEPS screen, and all I could see was the leg of Polly’s coffee table, with the sofa parked behind it. I could hear labored breathing in the background, and I screamed out for her, but all I could hear back was this unintelligible whisper. Then a hand reached into the frame. There were dark, violet spiderwebs from the fingertips down through the wrist. I remember that hand, that thing. It grabbed the WEPS and aimed it upward at the couch. And there was my sister, sideways on the sofa. There was a copper-colored stain beneath her cheek where she’d been drooling on the pillow. And it was all over her ears and hair, like an oil slick. Her eyes were all yellow like old parchment paper. She was hacking and wheezing, and I felt like I was holding on to her hand and she was dangling off a cliff, with gravity slowly loosening my grip.”
“Could she talk?”
“Barely. Every sentence seemed to take a year off her life. She had been with me in the hospital a few months earlier, when I had a heart attack. There was an outbreak of sheep flu in that hospital and, I dunno, it must have incubated in her body like they say it can. She and her husband had been quarantined, and she told me DES was coming for her, and I begged her not to do it. I begged her to wait for a cure. I wanted to deny it all. But that was what she wanted. She said she couldn’t live with the dread. That there was nothing left but the dread. She said she was relieved that this was the last decision she ever had to make.” I turned to get another beer for myself. Solara remained attentive. I felt a need to funnel every crevice of my soul into her brain as quickly as possible. “The thing that killed me was that I couldn’t see her. You know? All I had was her image on the WEPS. Everything felt so disconnected. She let the WEPS go, and I saw her kid crawl into the screen, and he was already discolored too. But he knew nothing—you know what I mean? His demeanor was exactly the same as it was before he got sick. He was too young to let anything ever hurt him. I wish I had that power sometimes. I wish I could float blissfully above it all, in the world but not of it. But I can’t. Anyway, that was the last I saw of my sister’s family.”
“And you never got sick?” she asked.
“I thought I would. I thought, ‘I was in that hospital. Matter of time.’ But here I am. I’m the last. I’m the leftovers.” I finished my beer in three quick gulps. “I’m sorry. I spaced out there.”
“It’s okay. I had a mother figure I watched go on the WEPS.”
“‘Mother figure?’”
“My mom committed suicide when I was fourteen.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pick a scab.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “My father was rich, but he abandoned us when I was four and went off to start another family, and they were the lucky generation of his family tree. They were the ones whose existence he acknowledged. My mom, brother, sister, and me he treated like a fungus in the crawl space. So she was left to deal, and it must have been too much, because she turned out bipolar. A manic among manic-depressives. Every conversation with her was like spinning a roulette wheel. One day my brother found her in her room. He never told me exactly what he saw. I had a friend, and her family took us in. Her mom became ours, so to speak. Then ten years ago . . . you know.”
“I know.”
“I saw her dying on the screen, and I had to fight the urge to turn it off, because it was just so easy to do that and not deal with it—to let her be some distant problem I didn’t have to acknowledge. But I left it on for as long as she let me. Then they took her off, and that was that. Another lamb.” She held the wet beer can tight. “This is good beer.”
“I’ve kept you too long,” I said. “Let’s do what we need to do for you.”
I fired up the plug-in, and we drove back onto the highway, cutting through the gathering mob of wraiths and specters.
DATE MODIFIED:
6/25/2079, 12:04 A.M.
The Birthday Girl
I booked a hotel room inside the Fredericksburg compound, to avoid driving at night through the freelands around I-95 north. I asked Solara if she wanted a room of her own. She said one with two beds was fine. I checked in alone. Solara waited in the plug-in, and I led her to the room via the fire stairs. I fully expected her to be gone by the morning, but I didn’t mind letting her slip out of my grasp. Truthfully, I still hadn’t quite figured out how to stage her mock end specialization. You need clearance from Containment to do a mock ES and wipe away the file. And they were unlikely to grant me such permission for a convicted domestic terrorist.
> Solara slept in her clothes. I had extra shirts in the plug-in and told her she could have a fresh one for the morning. I’d had too much beer on the drive to the hotel, and I woke up at three since alcohol gives me insomnia. I turned toward Solara and could make out her form in the opposite bed. Still there. She’d toss and turn on occasion, and I would fret that I’d woken her up. But it was nothing. I kept my gun under my pillow.
Being stuck awake in the middle of the night feels like prison. There’s nothing to do with yourself, especially when someone else is in the room. I couldn’t turn on the WEPS or read a book. I didn’t want to get up and leave Solara in the room alone. What’s more, I was still horribly tired, and so jealous of Solara for being comfortably ensconced in easy slumber. My eyes didn’t want to open, and my body had no wish to rise. But any further rest was out of reach. I could hear families packed into the adjacent rooms, using them as temp housing—babies crying, impossible to soothe. I let my mind go free, and it took me to familiar, unwanted places. My mother and father. My sister. Katy. Alison. David. Sonia. I mouthed their names. I heard myself whispering hello to David as if he were in the room and still an infant. I couldn’t make out his face, but I could feel myself pressing against his warm, pink skin. Hi, little fella! Hi! I hugged the pillow as if I were greeting my father at the Waterbury train station. I do this sometimes. I try to comfort myself with their imagined company. And then they slip away again.
I thought about the clients and the parade of government-approved bowling pins I had to knock down. The Greenies. The weird secessionists in their little neofeudalist bunkers. The insurgents. The tax cheats. I thought about them, the gorgeous sheen of vengeance long ago scratched away entirely. Then my conscience would toss those nagging little queries back into the hole it had dug just for them. My visions turned sexual, and I had to strangle my mind to keep it from fantasizing about the creature resting ten feet away. Even from my bed, I could smell her. She smelled so good, I wanted to scream. I looked at the glowing red digits of the old-fashioned hotel clock. It was three thirty.
I fell back into a three-quarter sleep at the futile hour of seven thirty in the morning. I got a minuscule dose of rest and woke up to find Solara putting on one of my spare shirts. She was over in the corner, with her back to me. When she spun round, I caught a glimpse of her belly just as the shirt was falling, and I could make out a series of thick scars carved into her abdomen. I opened my eyes wide.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” she said. “I wasn’t gonna flee.”
“It’s okay. I know. I saw your scars.”
“That’s not something I like to discuss.”
“No no. You don’t understand. The Greenies got me too.” I rolled up my T-shirt sleeve and showed her my bump. “It used to be my birthday,” I told her, “but I had them fix it. Well, fix it as much as it could be fixed.”
“Mine wasn’t Greenies. It was Randall.”
“Jesus.”
“He found out I had gotten the cure. So he had a friend hold me down, and he took a coat hanger and made his little Picasso.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. He dumped me after that. If I had known all it took to be free of him was a little branding, I would have let him do it much earlier. He’s what I fear. He’s what I’ve always feared. Even now that he’s dead. Especially now, because he bequeathed his hate to so many. I don’t know what they look like or which one’s coming for me. I never know who’s gonna be lurking around the corner. The police and the end specialists and the nutjobs out in the freelands, that’s all no big deal. But I know Randall’s folks have an eye on me. I know there’s an hourglass with my name etched on the side.”
She raised her shirt. I saw the date hewn in jagged tears, as if it had been done with an old fork.
6/27/99
“I turn eighty tomorrow,” she said. “That’s when he said they’d see me again. That’s my expiration date. That’s when I go bad.”
“I can fix this. I can get that removed.”
“You aren’t the first to offer.”
“Yes, but I may be the first in my industry to make the overture.” I decided in that second to stage her death myself and file it as if it were a real ES. I didn’t give a shit about the consequences. “I can wipe out the scar, and your file, and I can house you in a compound the insurgency wouldn’t dare touch. They choose much easier targets. Plus, it’s my own place. No roommate. You’ll have free run of the joint.”
“Why would you do that for me?”
“I already told you why.”
“No. That’s not all of it.” She glanced down at herself. Her shirt (my shirt) was still bunched on the left side. Her skirt rode low on her waist, and I could see the curve of her bare hip, a tiny hipbone poking out amid her tender flesh. I felt cosmic at the sight of her, like I could blow apart into a hundred million suns. She fixed the shirt, and it fell all the way down her body. “Is it?”
She was waiting for me to make an idiot of myself. I resisted. “It is,” I told her. “I have very little to hang my hat on, but I do pride myself on having some semblance of professionalism.”
“So your thoughts are pure right now?”
“Pure as cotton.”
She sighed. “I’m tired of men falling in love with me.”
“I don’t doubt that for a second. But I have been doing this for two decades. I don’t like to mix love and death.”
She held her gaze on me, and I gave her the very best poker face I could muster. I loved her the moment I saw her in the market. Maybe I’d loved her for far longer.
But miraculously, she bought it. “All right,” she said. “Then I guess it’s time for you to kill me.”
I showered and packed up. Solara threw up in the toilet. She wasn’t really going to die, but she said it made her nervous all the same.
I took out the list of questions for the interview and ran through them with her, asking for fierce hostility in the interview. I showed her the shot of saline that would be playing the part of SoFlo. Then I studied the map on the back door of the hotel room and blocked out our choreography. I hung my license around my neck, took out my gun, placed it against the small of her back, and escorted her out of the room. Families and men in cheap suits flooded the hallway and skittered around like vermin. I led Solara back to the fire stairs and down to the ground floor. We walked down a crowded hallway until I saw an entrance to the hotel lounge’s kitchen. I whispered for Solara to go, and she broke free from me, running into the kitchen. I chased after her and tackled her into a hard metal dolly filled with dishwasher racks. Plates and glasses crashed to floor as the cooks stared and backed away. Solara kicked and punched and clawed my face until I fired in the air to make her stop.
“I can either shoot you or you can stop on your own,” I told her.
She relented. I moved to begin recording, then turned to the kitchen staff. “I need this area clear!” I shouted. They pushed out the front, and I hit Record. “I am asking for confirmation that you are Solara Beck of Santa Monica, California.”
“No,” she said.
“Do you have a license on you?”
“Kiss my ass.”
“Do you have family members you wish to notify of your death?”
“I don’t have to tell you shit.”
“My records indicate that you are the aunt of Kitana Beck and Elise Beck of Arlington, Virginia. Would you like your soft assets transferred to them? There is no taxable penalty on this transfer.”
“Fuck you!”
“Come on. Give it to the nieces. Do something right for once in your life.”
She spat out the agreement, like they all do. “Fine.”
“You were tried in absentia for being an accessory to the bombings of nine separate doctor’s offices in New York, New York, on July 3, 2019. A public defender named Vincent Scagdiviglio presented your case . . .” And on and on I went. “Would you like to make a public statement of guilt and remorse?”
/>
She looked away, then turned back to the camera defiantly. This was not her first screen test. “Guilt? Remorse? Are you fucking joking? I never did anything wrong. You people chase me for decades, and now you want me to say I’m sorry while you fucking kill me? Why? So you can look good? So you can feel like you did something great for humanity? You people are the most hypocritical piles of shit to ever walk the earth. You’re gonna get what’s coming to you, I swear to God. And when you do, I’ll watch your blood run from heaven’s front row. Fuck you.”
I left the WEPS on for false posterity, took out the saline tube, and jammed it in her thigh. Her eyes kicked back and closed, and she gave a little snort and held her breath for ten, twenty, thirty, forty . . . I took her pulse, then called in the time of death. When I shut off the WEPS, Solara stayed limp on the ground, just as I asked. I took the file photos of her “corpse,” then I took her WEPS from her skirt pocket and smashed it to bits under my boot. A short-order cook walked in as I was about to collect the body. “Get the fuck out of here!” I screamed. He ran away.
I circled behind Solara and cinched my hands just below her breasts. I dragged her out of the kitchen and through the back entrance of the hotel to my plug-in, which was waiting nearby. I threw open the back door and laid her inside. The WEPS started going bonkers as I tossed the blanket on her and closed the door. It was Matt.
“Solara Beck!” he shouted. “Solara Beck! Holy shit, you found the little firecracker!”
“I did.”
“You get to pick lunch when you get back. No lie. I’ll let you pick anything, and I will go get it personally.”
“I’m tired. I’m going home. I’ll be back in tomorrow.”
“What about the body? Mosko wants a peek at her.”
“I already found a guy to deal with it in the Fredericksburg compound. The body’s gone. It’s all filed and done.”
“Really?”